


akiteru tries to steal some mulberries (and screws over his brother in the process)

by jintimacy



Series: a disturbance in the straight, dismal course of life [1]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Attempt at Humor, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, minor injury but nothing really gory, tsukishima akiteru is experiencing a quarter life crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 04:00:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28967961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jintimacy/pseuds/jintimacy
Summary: The first thing that establishes Kageyama Tobio’s place amongst the townspeople as a first-rate healer is his bloodline. The second thing that establishes his place as a first-rate healer as well as some godly sort of figure is the fact that within a week of his arrival, he helps rescue Keishin from the river rapids and essentially brings him back to life with his glowing blue hands.He really is Kazuyo’s grandson,they say.He’s amazing.
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou & Kageyama Tobio, Hinata Shouyou & Tsukishima Akiteru, Kageyama Tobio & Tsukishima Kei, Tsukishima Akiteru & Tsukishima Kei
Series: a disturbance in the straight, dismal course of life [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2124708
Comments: 4
Kudos: 25





	akiteru tries to steal some mulberries (and screws over his brother in the process)

Akiteru shatters his knee on a bright Tuesday morning in a spat with the local centaurs. 

_You cannot take our mulberries,_ they say, for the third time this month, _no matter how much you try to bribe us with your currency_ . _This is our land. This is our harvest._

Akiteru supposes it’s entirely his fault for not listening to them, but in his defense, the centaurs’ mulberries are much richer than the ones he buys at the market. He thinks it has something to do with the fact that their land is imbued with some kind of centaur magic, which is completely different from witch magic— more based in their hooves than in the entire body, as is the case for witches— but the centaurs never let him loiter around their land long enough for him to test out his theory. 

Anyway, his knee is completely decimated and hurts like a fucking bitch, so he tells Kei to bring a healer over to fix it and put him out of his misery. Kei tells him it’s his own fault for constantly bothering the centaurs (which is true) and that he ought to gift them a potion or two for their troubles (also true) and, finally, that he deserves to suffer with his broken knee for as long as it takes to heal naturally (he has enough pride to tell Kei that that’s entirely false). 

“Just call a healer over,” Akiteru groans around a mouthful of pain-numbing cloves. He bought them two weeks ago from Tadashi, who he thinks he really ought to sue right about now. These cloves are not doing a very good job of numbing the pain. “ _Please_.”

Kei takes a bite out of an apple and gives him a venomous glare. “I will if you promise not to bother the centaurs again.”

“Does it count as bothering them if I get on their good side?” Akiteru asks. Kei chucks the apple at his head. He misses. It makes a dent in the wall. 

“You’re not going to get on their good side in at least seven lifetimes,” Kei snaps. The apple floats back into his hand. “Once your knee heals, you really should apologize.”

Akiteru wipes an imaginary tear from the corner of his eye, but it’s not as imaginary as he would’ve liked because his knee still kills. “My baby brother,” he says. Kei’s face instantly twists into a horrified grimace. “All grown up and teaching me wrong from right.”

“I’m going to turn you into a squid.”

“No, you’re not. You can’t even transfigure bugs.”

Kei chucks the apple at him again. This time, it hits him square in the nose. Yeah, he’s _definitely_ pressing charges against Tadashi after all this.

: :

Kageyama Kazuyo is one of the best healers Karasuno has ever known. He can heal gaping wounds with a flick of the wrist, mend bones with a deft touch. He’s mastered the techniques of all the elemental healing methods, which means he can heal anyone and anything, from pixies to mermaids to dragons. 

He is also, unfortunately, dead. 

His children are scattered around various parts of Miyagi and have maintained little to no contact with anyone in Karasuno, but a few months ago, his grandson and an unknown orange-haired man were spotted moving into a small cottage by the river. 

“His friend is a shapeshifter,” Akiteru had heard once from Sugawara Koushi, elementary school teacher and town gossip. “Daichi says he’s seen him turn into a crow.”

(Whether or not that’s actually true is wildly up for debate. Sugawara spreads rumors like wildfire without any regard for whether it’s true or false, a fact Akiteru knows all too well because of a rumor a few years ago claiming that he and Kei were part werewolf. Their father, on future visits to Karasuno, took great care to trim and groom his beard.)

The point is that the first thing that establishes Kageyama Tobio’s place amongst the townspeople as a first-rate healer is his bloodline. The second thing that establishes his place as a first-rate healer as well as some godly sort of figure is the fact that within a week of his arrival, he helps rescue Keishin from the river rapids and essentially brings him back to life with his glowing blue hands. 

_He really is Kazuyo’s grandson_ , they say. _He’s amazing_. 

Akiteru wonders, sometimes, if the constant reverence becomes bothersome. If, because it’s all he hears, he feels the need to live up to his status. It’s at times like these that Akiteru is glad for his own failed career as a warrior; his status will never overshadow him, because it doesn’t exist in the first place. Instead he spends his days sneaking around the outskirts of the centaurs’ land to collect mulberries to make his serums. 

It’s a simple life. Well, when he’s not getting his bones broken by centaurs. 

: :

Kei returns home half an hour later, bringing the smell of strawberry tarts and sea salt with him. Two voices, one familiar and one not, float down the hallway. Akiteru sits up in bed as his bedroom door slides open. The first thing he sees are blue hands and a crow with a tuft of orange on its head. 

_Sugawara was right_ , Akiteru thinks. The pain numbing cloves have side effects. His brain is moving a little too slow. _Kageyama’s friend really is a shapeshifter_. 

Then his stomach drops out from underneath him. 

“You’re Kageyama Tobio!” he exclaims. “I— Hello!” He can’t bow on account of being bedridden on account of his broken knee on account of the centaurs on account of their mulberries so he opts to duck his head awkwardly. Kageyama does the same, as does his shapeshifter friend. 

“Hello,” Kageyama says, and frowns. “You look like you’re doing well.”

 _You look like you’re doing well_ , is not something Akiteru thought he would hear coming from someone who looks like they’ve just been spit on. He sneaks a glance at Kei, who’s wearing the nastiest shit-eating grin known to man. Akiteru’s worst fears are confirmed. 

He spits the cloves out into an empty cup and clears his throat. “What did my brother tell you?”

“That you got into a fight with some centaurs,” Kageyama says slowly, glancing suspiciously at Kei, “and they cursed you. He told me you were dying.”

Mortification crawls up Akiteru’s spine like kudzu and wraps tight around his throat. “I’m very sorry,” he says, “but my brother lied to you. My knee is only broken.”

The clock ticks mockingly in the thick silence of the room. The crow fluffs its feathers. Kageyama squints viciously at Kei. His blue hands glow bluer. “You told me he was _dying_.”

Kei throws his hands up, all nonchalant, as if Kageyama isn’t glaring at him like he wants to chuck him out the window right this very instant. “You should’ve seen him,” he says. “The way he was complaining really did make me worry that he might die.”

Akiteru scratches the side of his nose. “I’m very sorry for troubling you.”

“ _I don’t_ —” Kageyama starts with a snarl, but his crow friend pecks his ear sharply. He cuts himself off. The bright blue light from his hands starts to fade. “I don’t want an apology from you,” he says, calmer, quieter. “I _would_ very much like one from your brother, though.”

“I’m sorry,” Kei drawls, not sounding sorry at all, “for worrying about my brother.”

“That’s _not_ an apology,” Kageyama says. 

_Caw! Caw!_ the crow agrees. 

In the meantime, Akiteru’s knee is starting to hurt again. He briefly considers putting the cloves back into his mouth and quickly decides against it on account of the fact that it’ll feel disgusting. “Um,” he says. Kei and Kageyama are still arguing. The crow is still crowing. The clock is still ticking. “ _Um_ ,” he says, louder this time. 

_Caw_! says the crow, pecking Kageyama’s ear again. Kageyama looks over. Kei looks pissed. 

“I really am sorry that my brother disturbed you,” Akiteru says, “and made you come all this way just to heal my knee, but— I would appreciate it if you could heal me. I’ll pay you a hefty sum for your troubles.”

Kageyama’s face crumbles. The light from his palms fades to something dim and ashamed. “You don’t need to pay me,” he says hastily. “I don’t charge money to heal injuries like this, only for potions and serums and the like.” He pulls his bag off of his shoulder and pulls out a vial of shimmery silver liquid. His crow friend flies off his shoulder and perches atop Akiteru’s bedside table. 

“I’m sorry for neglecting you all this time,” Kageyama adds, tugging up Akiteru’s pant leg to reveal his bandaged knee. “But your brother is a pain in the ass.”

Akiteru, despite himself, smiles as Kageyama gingerly tugs the bandages off. “That he is,” he says, as the crow hops closer to peer at his knee. “I’m glad we can agree on that.” 

Kei makes a wounded noise from the corner of the room. Akiteru and Kageyama both ignore it. The crow caws smugly. 

Kageyama’s hands glow a bright blue as he starts to apply the silver liquid. “Hey, uh,” Akiteru groans, panic rising in his chest, “is it normal to feel like I’m about to pass out?”

“Yes,” Kageyama says. The liquid is somehow both warm and cold on his skin, and makes his entire leg buzz like it’s falling asleep. “I’m speeding up your body’s natural healing process, so it’s inevitable that you’ll get tired. You can rest.”

“Oh, okay,” Akiteru says, “thanks,” and promptly blacks out. 

: :

He wakes up to shouting. 

“I’m sorry for not worshipping the ground you walk on, _your Highness_ , but I—”

“Stop fucking calling me that! What did I ever do to you?”

“Kageyama!” comes a different voice. “You need to calm down—”

“You _cannot_ be serious—” Kei cuts in. 

“ _You’re_ the one who kept antagonizing me, _you’re_ the one who thought it would be funny to scare the hell out of Hinata—”

“Seriously, Kageyama,” says Kageyama’s crow friend, who is no longer a crow with a tuft of orange but a human with a tuft of orange who is startlingly naked and is apparently named Hinata, “it’s fine, _I’m_ fine, you just need to chill before—”

It’s then that Akiteru becomes aware of the blinding blue light emanating from Kageyama’s palms. Kei seems to become aware of it at that moment, too, because he falters and his words die on his tongue. 

Akiteru is suddenly struck by a feeling of what can only be described as terror. The air grows cold and heavy. Kageyama’s palms go white. Someone is screaming. It takes him a few seconds to realize that it’s himself. 

: :

Hinata tells him that the full recovery period after having a bone healed, especially one as vital as his knee, is generally twelve hours. He tells him this while he’s human and fully clothed and in Akiteru’s kitchen, making him breakfast. _You’ll be drowsy_ , he says, _and out of commission. The only thing you can do is take it easy_.

He also tells him, between childhood anecdotes of dragon-egg-stealing and tree-climbing and waterfall-freezing, that Kageyama and Kei will be back by the evening. Apparently, this whole accidentally-turning-someone-into-an-animal-in-a-fit-of-rage thing has happened before. It had, in fact, happened to Hinata some four years ago. 

“I got turned into a crow,” Hinata says when Akiteru asks what animal he got turned into and immediately feels like a huge idiot about. Hinata laughs. His orange hair seems to glow. “Don’t worry,” he says, waving away Akiteru’s embarrassment. “It’s not just the body that feels all out-of-whack during the recovery process. The mind does, too.”

He tells him that it took Kageyama just over twenty four hours to figure out how to turn him back into a human. Except it didn’t entirely work, because Hinata was left with feathers poking out of his shirt and an affinity for shiny trinkets, so he had to go back to Kageyama and demand to be fixed, properly this time.

The thing about healers’ magic, though, is that it’s usually permanent. Once a bone or a wound is healed, healers cannot undo their work. So Kageyama told him that he _couldn’t_ be fixed, which led to a few well-aimed punches being thrown and, one training montage later, a friendship so strong that not even the gods could separate them. 

So Kageyama did not fix him. He merely helped Hinata work with what he’d been stuck with, and now Hinata can shapeshift into a crow at will. 

“I can also do this,” he says, and strips off his shirt to sprout silky black wings from his back. 

“Holy shit,” Akiteru says around a mouthful of eggs. “So what’ll Kei be able to do?”

: :

They make a trip to the library before lunch to look up information about frogs. Based on the information they find, Hinata makes a list of Kei’s probable future attributes.

  * slime slime slime!!
  * webbed toes and fingers
  * will croak a lot
  * will jump really high (no fair, he’s already so tall)
  * will swim really well
  * might get dehydrated very easily (might need a nearby water source?)
  * TOXIC SKIN ?????



“Some South American frogs are so toxic that just one drop of their skin secretions can kill an adult human!” Hinata hisses, stabbing his finger into the page. A horrifying grin splits his face. “What if he becomes a _murderer_!”

“Um,” Akiteru says. Kei has a penchant for giving people looks cold enough that they feel like they’d rather be dead, but Akiteru doesn’t think he would willingly murder anyone in cold blood. “I hope not.” Then another thought occurs to him. “Wait, we’re Japanese.”

Hinata blinks once, twice as the words slowly register. His smile fades. “Not South American.”

“Definitely not.”

“Damnit.”

: :

Hinata asks him how he broke his knee. He asks him this while he’s got his wings out and is fluttering up around a mulberry tree picking mulberries off their stems for Akiteru, who is still a little winded from their walk to the library to the inn for lunch to the edge of the woods by the river, so naturally, Akiteru launches into an explanation of the Shrieking Cats.

The Shrieking Cats are not actually shrieking cats. They’re unicorns, which are probably closer to shrieking horses, but Kei said they sounded like shrieking cats once when he was six and the name stuck. 

Every two months, the ~~Shrieking Cats~~ unicorns on the Ukais’ farm decide to inconvenience every living creature within a five mile radius and scream throughout the night. Akiteru has heard that it’s some sort of ritual that’s meant to clean their horns of any toxins, but he doesn’t entirely understand why they need to be so loud about it. Kei’s theory is that they’re biologically attuned to being bastards. 

Anyway, Akiteru has a theory. He thinks that if he concocts a potion that’s the right balance of a sleeping draught, a cleaning spell, and a silencing serum, he’ll create something that’ll let the citizens of Karasuno sleep soundly all 365 days of the year without having to worry about unicorns shrieking into the still night air every other month. 

He once told this theory to Kuroo, resident unicorn expert, who looked at him like he’d just announced that he was trying to build a planet with his bare hands and sheer force of will and then proceeded to laugh in his face (for which he apologized) and told him he’d be wasting his time (for which he did not). “I really doubt unicorns will be affected at all by a mere potion, Akiteru-san. They’ve been doing this for thousands of years. Do you really think one person— and a _potions master_ at that— can put a stop to it?”

 _Yes_ , Akiteru, resident potions master and stubborn asshole, wanted to say. _Yes, I think I can_.

For now, he tells this theory to Hinata, who flutters down from the mulberry tree with a basket full of mulberries and says, “Huh.” Which is not really a response as it is a reaction, but it’s not wholly negative, so Akiteru takes it as a win.

“I told an acquaintance about this,” Akiteru says, popping one of the mulberries into his mouth. Hm. Still not as rich as the ones grown by the centaurs, but better than the ones at the market. “He said it was a waste of time.”

“I don’t think it is,” Hinata says earnestly. His eyes sparkle with something like confidence and faith. Akiteru is struck with the urge to adopt Hinata as a second younger brother. “But how does this relate to how you broke your knee, exactly?”

Ah. He’d forgotten the main point of the story. So he explains his search for good mulberries. He explains his brief stint in gardening in hopes to grow the richest mulberries possible for this potion. He explains his failed stint in gardening, after which, in a state of desperation, came a short phase in his life as a criminal, sneaking onto centaur land and stealing some of their far superior mulberries. 

For which, like anything, there were repercussions. In his case, a bruised ego and a broken knee. 

“You can’t accomplish anything without some sort of roadblock,” Hinata says. “I, for one, have had many.”

Akiteru nods and waits for Hinata to elaborate. He doesn’t. Instead he spreads his wings and motions for Akiteru to get onto his back. 

“Let’s go make some potions.”

: :

They make the potion. They go to the Ukais’ farm. Keishin screams at him to go home and rest. Takeda, who is there, because he’s always where Keishin is because he’s a love struck fool, tells Keishin to stop screaming and tells Akiteru in a firm tone of voice to go home and rest. 

So Akiteru goes home and rests. The potion remains in his bag. 

: :

“Akiteru-san.”

“What.”

“Stop sulking.”

“I’m not sulking.”

“Yes, you a—”

“I am _not_ sulking.”

: :

Kei comes back home that evening with a sheen of slime on his throat, a fresh set of clothes, and the exhaustion of a man who’s lived through five wars. 

“They’re Kageyama’s,” he grits out when Akiteru asks him where he got the clothes. “You know, because he brought me back to his house as a frog and _buck naked_.” 

“He’s also the reason you’re here as a _human_ ,” Akiteru says with an eyeroll. “You should be grateful.”

“No.”

“You also owe him a favor,” Akiteru continues, ignoring Kei’s petulant outburst. “Did you at least thank him?”

“Of course I thanked him. Do you think I’m a child?” Kei snaps, but his nostrils flare in a telltale sign that he’s lying. 

“ _Kei_.”

“ _Nii-san_.”

Hinata looks between the two of them in bewildered amusement. “Uh, I think I’m gonna head out.” He adjusts his bag and gives him a blinding smile. Then he turns to Kei and pats him on the shoulder. “Anyway, Tsukishima-kun! You’ll probably be prone to random croaks throughout the day, especially for the first few weeks. So let me know if you need any help with anything!”

Kei looks as though Hinata has suggested licking the bottom of his shoe. “I most certainly will not.”

Hinata ignores him and waves at Akiteru. “See you around, Akiteru-san!”

“Bye—”

“Wait, why is he _Akiteru-san_ and I’m _Tsukishima-kun_?”

Hinata turns, one foot out the door. His eyes sparkle with mirth and something else, something mean. “Would you like me to call you Kei-kun?”

Kei recoils in horror and lets out a terrified croak. Akiteru cuts off an undignified snort with a hasty clamp of his teeth. “No,” Kei says. “Never mind. Get the hell out of here.”

“Bye, Kei-kun!”

Kei ribbits angrily. The door slams shut. Akiteru, for the first time in a long time, lets himself laugh.

**Author's Note:**

> hello!! this came into fruiton bc i wanted to write something short and plotless but then it spiraled into something over 3k,, and still plotless. anyway, this is the first part of many. there's no planning going into this so in future updates if there's a plot hole or if something doesn't make sense, just ignore it. this is supposed to be a very low-stakes series that i will update sporadically. i've always wanted to write some kind of magic au.  
> i hope you've enjoyed this! pls comment and let me know your favorite part, and what you hope to see in future additions to the series. thank you for reading!


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